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Bernd Haupt

Bernd Haupt

Penn State Altoona has announced the award recipients and retirees who will be honored at the annual Faculty and Staff Awards ceremony, to be held at 3 p.m. May 3 in the auditorium of the Devorris Downtown Center.

Crabs, fishing, land use and pollution sources are frequently hot topics for researchers in the Chesapeake Bay area, but finding all the available information, especially remote sensing data, is frequently a chore. Now, ChesapeakeView, a project of the AmericaView consortium, brings together a variety of datasets and makes them available to anyone who needs them for research, planning or other studies.

Beef ranchers in South Dakota were devastated when they recently discovered more than 2,800 of their cattle were dead, the result of an extended heat wave in the area. Geographic Information System (GIS) map services developed through a collaborative effort between the National Weather Service and Penn State could have alerted ranchers about this potential tragedy. Two weather variables, high temperature and high humidity, combined over prolonged periods to create conditions that caused the cattle deaths. Using combinations of different weather-related variables, GIS map services can serve up easy-to-read formats that target the needs of multiple users.

Bernd Haupt, senior research associate with the Penn State Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and Maurie Caitlin Kelly, senior research assistant and director of informatics with the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment, authored the chapter "Ensuring the future of the oceans" in the "Companion Encyclopedia of Geography: From Local to Global," second edition, published by Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.

A model of the leak dynamics of the oil tanker, Prestige, that sunk off the coast of Spain in 2002, may help assess recovery and cleanup methods for future tanker accidents, according to an international team of researchers. "We believe that 14,000 metric tons (15,400 British tons) of oil were recovered from the tanker using the shuttle-bag system, and that between 16,000 (17,600) and 23,000 (25,300) tons of oil are still in the ship," says Bernd J. Haupt, senior research associate, Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State.